With the Body - IN SEARCH OF SPACE #218

“I don’t really like most people in the world, or trust
them. The guns are less of a thug or violent thing and more of a separation
between us and society.” – Lee Buford – Drums and Programming.

The Body ought to have been called something more obvious
and accurate, perhaps “I don’t even like music” or “I drink to die”, maybe go
outside the norm and be called “The world is not our home”: all monikers used
by the band on shirts and various other sources. All would be appropriate as
answers when a beaming colleague asks you on a Monday morning “What good music
did you hear last week” and you spent the entire bank holiday weekend listening
to a sound that is either the audio equivalent of the motor oil, blood and
brain matter tramped into a pub carpet following a vicious stomping, or the
last gravity-garbled sounds as an experimental spacecraft breaks up as it
enters the corona of the sun with the crew screaming onboard.

Looking like the people that come to a sticky end in episode
five of True Detective, sorta redneck gun-obsessed troublemaker types, these
Portland casuals’ unholy racket I first heard at the release of their stunning EP,
Master, We Perish, which is perhaps their most direct work, with driving riffs
and vocals reminiscent of Ramesses and a stellar mile away from their latest, a
meeting-of-minds with sludge heavyweights Thou pleasingly called You, Whom I
Have Always Hated. The EP drew me in not with its sound or dense, virtually
impenetrable five-metre fog of distorted sound and downtuned electricity, but
with the terrifying album artwork, with a ruined skeletal figure atop what
appears to be a mountain of stones, ripped gruesomely through the middle and
bent back into a distorted yoga pose from straight out of the Inferno, mouth
agape in silent screaming pain. The artwork is so psychotically fractal, so
important and yet so obtuse that I challenge you to find something on a record
sleeve more instantly evocative or piercingly relevant.

Alone, the Body can be direct, as on Master, We Perish, or
they can be crawlingly self-indulgent as on Christs, Redeemers; it’s when they
combine forces that the music starts to climb out of the stygian pit and begins
to feel the warmth of something more substantial than dank metal. Collaboration
has always been at the heart of the group, Both Christs, Redeemers and the
excellent All the Waters Of The Earth Shall Turn To Blood were built with the
help of choirs, with the opener from their 2013 evocatively seeing the
all-female Assembly of Light Choir apparently fed mercilessly to a meat grinder
of noise. Their latest efforts alongside Haxan Cloak and sludge juggernauts
Thou have yielded some of the Body’s most interesting material yet. Pure
collabs are rare in extreme metal circles, even while splits are common, but
the Portland group are successful in using collaboration to explore their own
sound, with Haxan Cloak, his music giving them endless eddies of stopped time
with which to play, and with Thou packing out the sound in a completely
claustrophobically overwhelming thud.

New work by the Body is greeted with reverence among the
metal community. I get the sense they’re a band like Sunn O))), achieving much
more success than their genre would indicate because they tap into something
fashionable, but also that they are a band with an uncompromisingly unpleasant
sound so not many people actually listen to the records with any frequency. In
stripped down, drums-and-guitar growls and in
nihilistic-to-the-point-of-solipsism darkness, the Body are as yet unmatched.
You can take the beery party of Weedeater or the druidic rumblings of latterday
Leckie Wizard; the people pushing sludge music forward, in torrents and leaps
out of manhole covers, are the Body.

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